AIL: The Anthropology Image Lab is a venue located in Young Hall 226 at the University of California, Davis, and an online platform. Its objective is to engage the challenges posed by contemporary images and curatorial practice to anthropological thinking. AIL foregrounds curatorial work as a tool for designing fieldwork mise-en-scènes and for cultivating intriguing forms of difference.
The motion of this difference is not friction-free. It is an effect of an assemblage of practices whose desires and struggles form a vibrant and unstable triptych: 1) a continuation of the fascinating “experimental moment in the human sciences,” its critical vocation and reconfiguration of anthropology’s modernist legacy (Marcus & Fisher, 1985); 2) a conceptualization of a contemporary “aesthetics of existence” (Elhaik, 2022); and 3) a commitment to reconfiguring the human or anthropos (Rabinow, 2003; 2011) in dialogue with critical artists and imaginative scientists. Through fieldwork-based conversations, the lab’s aim is both to problematize the mediatory role and increasing influence of curatorial practice in contemporary life and to evaluate the ethical, political, and aesthetic implications of curation for imagining other ways of living and being human. The lab cultivates new forms and modes of “anthropo-curation” or “curating anthropos” (Elhaik, 2016).
The acronym (AIL) refers to our “curatorial designs“, with an understanding of curation as a practice and mode of thought grounded in innovative articulations of care, cura, and the incurable (Elhaik, 2016). AIL is also inspired by the creative pedagogy of psychoanalyst D.W Winnicott. It is therefore a venue that functions as a “potential space” and ‘facilitating environment”. AIL is an unusual lab populated by image and curatorial workers who create together, through on-campus and online events, two multimedia series (cf. Cogitations and Podcast Archive), and the research cluster ACTS. In 2023, a new series was created: The Strait and the Sea.
Tarek Elhaik